Friday, February 28, 2014

As I Lay Dying Frontman Pleads Guilty in Murder for Hire Plot

Tim Lambesis faces up to nine years in jail and $10,000 fine

Tim Lambesis, the frontman for metalcore band As I Lay Dying, has pleaded guilty to his role in a murder-for-hire plot, admitting Tuesday that he had hired a man to kill his wife. He faces a maximum sentence of nine years in prison and $10,000 fine, according to ABC 10 News.

Undercover police in San Diego arrested Lambesis last May after the singer had begun seeking out a hit man to kill his estranged wife of eight years, Meggan, who had asked the San Diego Superior Court to dissolve their marriage the previous September. He reportedly gave an undercover detective $1,000 in cash, as well as instructions on how to carry out the murder. After his arrest, Lambesis pleaded not guilty at his arraignment. A judge set the singer's bail at $3 million and affixed a GPS monitoring device to him; he was later released on $2 million bail.

Lambesis' lawyer told reporters that month that the vocalist was on steroids when he hired the policeman. He said that as a result of Lambesis's drug use, the vocalist's thought process was "devastatingly affected."

At that point in time, news came out that Lambesis had written a letter to Meggan saying that he no longer loved her and he had lost faith in God. Furthermore, she discovered that he had carried on multiple affairs over the course of their marriage and even had a girlfriend at the time. The couple had adopted three children from Ethiopia and she said in her divorce filing that she worried about his ability to care for the kids, as he was "obsessed with bodybuilding." He also reportedly spent thousands of dollars on tattoos.

In September, a court decided that Lambesis would have to stand trial on the murder-for-hire charges. According to NBC San Diego, the vocalist's personal trainer testified at a pretrial hearing that "he wanted to know if maybe I could find someone to do it for him."

The group's last album, Awakened, came out in 2012 and debuted at Number 11 on the Billboard Top 200.